The new dynamic came into sharp relief last weekend, when a CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey showed Warren surging into the top tier in Iowa with former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders, who was well off the pace in third, trailed her in the state by more than 10 points, 22% to 11%.Perhaps more worrying to some Sanders supporters, the Massachusetts progressive also overtook her colleague from Vermont with what has traditionally been his most reliable bloc of support: voters under 35, among whom Warren now leads in Iowa, 27% to Sanders' 22%.Asked by a reporter on Sunday about the poll, Sanders said the campaign's internal numbers painted a different picture. But even if the senator and his staff have reason to believe the Iowa race is closer than the most recent polling indicates, interviews with two senior aides to Sanders revealed growing concerns that the Hawkeye State and New Hampshire could be at risk of slipping away.The twin sources of frustration and internal debate, both aides told CNN, was a schedule that too often takes Sanders away from the early voting states and a perception among staff, especially in Iowa, that the campaign has been wrong-headed in its decision to put off investing there in television ads."It can't be this national campaign anymore. He's got to go on TV in Iowa. He's got to park himself in Iowa. He's got to show that he's the underdog fighting back," one of the aides told CNN.The aide, who said that staff in Iowa has been "screaming for Bernie to get on TV" there, suggested that Sanders had overestimated his strength in Iowa and New Hampshire.
IN DECEMBER 2015, I was an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the Times. That month, I published a story reporting that Vice President Joe Biden had just traveled to Ukraine, in part to send a message to the Ukrainian government that it needed to crack down on corruption.But I also wrote that his anti-corruption message might be undermined by the association of his son Hunter with one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Zlochevsky had been Ukraine's ecology minister under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader who had been forced into exile in Russia.Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma in April 2014, the same month that British officials froze Zlochevsky's London bank accounts containing $23 million. Britain's Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, was conducting a money-laundering investigation and refused to allow Zlochevsky or Burisma Holdings, the company's chief legal officer, and another company owned by Zlochevsky access to the accounts.But the British money-laundering investigation was stymied by Ukrainian prosecutors' refusal to cooperate. The Ukrainian prosecutors would not turn over documents needed in the British investigation, and without that documentary evidence, a British court ordered Britain's Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets.In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech in which he attacked the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office for failing to cooperate with the British investigation. In his speech -- which I quoted in my story -- Pyatt mentioned Burisma's owner by name."In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people," Pyatt said. Officials at the prosecutor general's office, he added, were asked by the United Kingdom "to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky's attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus."When Joe Biden arrived in Ukraine in December 2015 to press for more aggressive anti-corruption efforts by the government, Hunter Biden's role with Burisma made his father's demands, however well-intentioned, appear politically awkward and hypocritical. That was the point of my story. I quoted Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who said the involvement of the vice president's son with Zlochevsky's firm undermined the Obama administration's anti-corruption message in Ukraine."Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message," Chow said. "But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues." [...]In May, when this issue began to surface, The Intercept's Robert Mackey wrote an excellent piece debunking the lies in the new pro-Trump version of the Biden story. In the process, he provided greater detail than I had included in my 2015 story. He wrote that Shokin had been forced from office at Biden's urging because he had failed to thoroughly investigate corruption and stifled efforts to expose embezzlement and misconduct by public officials. Biden did threaten to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees unless Shokin was ousted. But that was because Shokin had blocked serious anti-corruption investigations, not because he was investigating Burisma.
At a recent conservative conference in Washington, DC, according to one attendee, the "slur du jour" was "neoliberalism".A turning point came in January, when the Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson told his three million viewers that "Republican leaders" were in thrall to "corporate propaganda", and seemed to have forgotten that "market capitalism is not a religion". Carlson expressed his loathing for private equity and payday loan companies, remarking of the latter: "Libertarians tell us that's how markets work - consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it's also disgusting." Subsequently, Carlson has railed against the Koch brothers, the billionaire funders of right-wing think tanks, and has characterised the average Republican politician as "a libertarian zealot controlled by the banks, yammering on about entrepreneurship".While Carlson fires off sound-bites, a phalanx of intellectuals offers a more in-depth critique. The philosopher Patrick Deneen has persuaded many of his fellow social conservatives that their true enemy is Enlightenment liberalism: a distorted idea of freedom, Deneen argues, which has led to both social progressivism on abortion and marriage, and the injustices and inequalities of modern capitalism.In March this year, several prominent thinkers, among them Deneen and the writers Sohrab Ahmari and Rod Dreher, signed a manifesto celebrating the death of "the old conservative consensus". Published in First Things, traditionally the intellectual journal of the religious right, the manifesto called for "a political movement that heeds the cries of the working class as much as the demands of capital". The details have been fleshed out by thinkers such as Oren Cass - who advocates an industrial policy based on supporting workers instead of maximising GDP - and in the cerebral quarterly American Affairs, the most recent issue of which proposes a huge expansion of child benefit. Part of the money, the authors suggest, could come from a financial transaction tax.
During their 30-minute call on July 25, Zelensky, eager for US military aid to help his country fend off Russian aggression, slavishly kissed up to Trump, praising him for his campaign tactics and saying that "I had an opportunity to learn from you." As the conversation wound down, Zelensky brought up Trump's favorite subject--his properties."I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States. Actually, last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower," Zelensky said, according to the non-verbatim memo of their call.
Iranian President Hassan Rohani has told the UN General Assembly that Iran won't negotiate on its nuclear program as long as it remains under sanctions, and accused the United States of "merciless economic terrorism."
The U.S. Senate on Wednesday voted to overturn President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border. Eleven Republicans joined the vote forced by Senate Democrats to pass the revocation by a vote of 54-41.
Hmmm... The White House just sent its talking points on Ukraine to House Democrats.
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) September 25, 2019
Here are some screenshots, per source. pic.twitter.com/VvNAaqKP3D
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Trump were discussing gun violence over the telephone Tuesday morning when the president abruptly changed the topic to an intelligence community whistle-blower complaint that had Democrats talking about impeachment.Ms. Pelosi stopped him short."Mr. President," she declared, according to a person familiar with the conversation, "you have come into my wheelhouse." [...]Long before she was speaker, Ms. Pelosi served as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, overseeing the secretive workings of America's national security apparatus and helping to draft the law that governs how intelligence officials file whistle-blower complaints, and how that information is shared with Congress.She saw the latest allegations against Mr. Trump -- that he pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate a leading political rival, then worked to bury an intelligence whistle-blower's complaint detailing the effort -- as an egregious perversion of the process.
The notion that we live in a zero sum, Hobbesian world where there is limited scope for cooperation is the bogus premise behind the entire America-first platform. The notion that the United States had no interest in helping to strengthen Europe and Japan to resist Soviet expansionism and to afford U.S. exports is too ridiculous to even bother to discuss.All U.S. presidents since 1945 have had recourse to this more contentious approach to international relations, but none chose that path. Instead, they all preferred the rule of law and supported the institutions underpinning those rules. When people in other countries are free and can prosper, that is unequivocally good for Americans. When Americans can engage in commercial transactions with foreigners, we are all better off. Rules that foster exchange and cooperation are essential. To blow up the system because you may calculate that the United States will lose the least (a sort of limited nuclear war type of doctrine) becomes a plausible course of action to nationalists who think in zero-sum terms.
Bernie is down to 12% in *New Hampshire*??? Whoa. https://t.co/d28zkMwTVK
— Charles Gaba (@charles_gaba) September 24, 2019
Deflation pressure is the biggest domestic risk facing South Korea's economy and its central bank should cut interest rates aggressively, a senior economist at credit rating agency S&P told Reuters on Wednesday.
The sudden embrace of an impeachment inquiry by previously reluctant House Democrats -- most notably Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- is attributable to one fundamental fact: They believe the new accusations against Mr. Trump are simple and serious enough to be grasped by a public overwhelmed by the constant din of complex charges and countercharges that has become the norm in today's Washington.In contrast to the murkiness of the special counsel's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, Democrats see the current allegations as damningly clear-cut. His refusal so far to provide Congress with an intelligence official's whistle-blower complaint as required by law, coupled with the possibility that Mr. Trump dangled American military aid as a bargaining chip to win investigation of a political rival by a foreign government, strikes them as a stark case of presidential wrongdoing. They consider it egregious enough that they expect many Americans who had been cool to the idea of moving to oust the president to recognize the imperative for the House to act."It has shifted the ground," Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said about the new allegations against the president, as party support for an impeachment inquiry solidified. "It makes the brazenness of the conduct and the simplicity of the misconduct easy for everybody to understand."
Rudy Giuliani's contacts with officials at the State Department as part of his controversial efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine are more extensive than have been publicly reported. And they raise additional questions about the degree to which senior officials throughout the Trump administration were involved in--or privy to--attempts by the president to muddy a top potential political opponent.Over the course of the past year, Giuliani has participated in a far-flung campaign by Trump allies to unearth damaging information about Biden and his son Hunter. As part of that effort, Giuliani pressed the Ukrainian government to investigate so far unfounded allegations of corruption in the country involving the Bidens. At the time, Hunter Biden was accused of using his father's political standing to secure lucrative business opportunities abroad. Ukraine's prosecutor general would subsequently say he had no evidence of any wrongdoing.This summer, Giuliani briefed U.S. diplomats, including special representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker, on his work in Ukraine and his efforts to convince the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens. But Giuliani confirmed to The Daily Beast that he also briefed another diplomat: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. President Trump's lawyer said he briefed both Volker (whom he referred to as the "main one" in terms of his State contacts) and Sondland on multiple conference calls earlier this year about his progress in pursuing a Ukraine investigation.
Few in the White House or the wider Trump orbit have privately defended Trump's call with the Ukraine leader in which he reportedly asked eight times about investigating the Biden clan's business dealings in the country. The incident violates the principle that U.S. officials should never allow or encourage foreign governments to interfere in U.S. elections.Trump advisers and senior administration aides pivoted any discussion of the president's call and ensuing whistleblower complaint to focus on the Bidens ...
Several senior national security officials were so concerned that President Trump would push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, that they tried to keep the pair from meeting or having a phone conversation, several current and former U.S. officials told The Washington Post on Tuesday.The officials said that Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, became extremely interested in Ukraine earlier this year, and top National Security Council officials were worried he would urge Trump to use U.S. leverage in order to get Zelensky to bend. Giuliani appeared to have some sort of hidden agenda when it came to Ukraine, several officials told the Post, and he worked to have the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed and sidelined national security officials. In May, he announced he was heading to Ukraine to start "meddling in an investigation" that could be "very, very helpful" to Trump, but he canceled after bizarrely claiming he had been "set up."
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is moving back to her native South Carolina, re-establishing a home base and also fueling speculation that a return to politics is next on her to-do list.
Even as recently ten years ago, after a wave of litigation striking down campus speech regulations, the vast majority of American colleges and universities still kept clearly unconstitutional speech codes on the books. They kept losing in court, yet they still couldn't quit their codes.Fast-forward a decade and that's changed. Between 2009 and 2019, the portion of surveyed American universities with what the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education classifies as "red light" speech codes has shrunk from 74.2 percent to a mere 28.5 percent, and a total of 17 states have enacted some form of campus free-speech legislation.
The move by Democrats in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump has caused nervousness on Wall Street - but history suggests investors need not worry. [...]Wall Street dropped and the dollar tumbled in the months ahead of President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, when he was under threat of impeachment over the Watergate scandal.But that market volatility also stood against a backdrop of Nixon's decision to suspend the dollar's convertibility into gold and a recession following the oil shock of late 1973, according to JPMorgan's John Normand.After early volatility, Wall Street also weathered the 1998 impeachment of Clinton, who was later acquitted by the Senate.